From the Archives: a Few from the Great Lakes

 

In a previous life, I regularly traveled to the states that adjoin Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Erie. I can't begin to count the trips to Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio to conduit surveys, attend conferences, and meet coworkers. Here are a few memories of those trips a long time ago (when you are as old as I am, many memories are of events a long long time ago....).

 

North Central Ohio  

 

I landed in Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and rented a car. Heading north on W 220th Street, I came across a Chevrolet Corvair repair shop! It was owned by the legendary Jim Battenhouse (Dr. Corvair). What a treat to see some clean Corvairs again. Some of you old-timers may remember Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile by Ralph Nader. In the first chapter, Nader attacked the Corvair as a "one-car accident" because of its rear-engine, swing-axle suspension. Sales of the innovative Corvair plummeted, and, starting in 1964, the more traditional Ford Mustang totally outsold the Chevrolet product. (These photos: Fuji Super HQ 100 film, Olympus OM2S camera).

 

Green Derby, Rte 2, Benton Township, Ohio

I am unable to find this location. The restaurant probably closed years ago. 

Benton Harbor, Michigan

 

Wet departure from Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport, November 1993

Time for food, Benton Harbor

Roxy Hot Wings, 287 East Main Street, Benton Harbor

(Kodachrome film, Leica M3 camera, 50mm lens)   

One of my early projects was a sediment study at St. Joseph, Michigan, on the east shore of Lake Michigan. Benton Harbor, just across the St. Joseph River, was very rust belt back in the 1990s. I wish I had more time to explore. 

 

Friend and coworker, Mr. Charlie Johnson

(Kodak Gold 100 film, Canon Rebel camera) 

Charlie was known as Mr. Great Lakes. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of every harbor, every beach, the source of its sediment, and where it was going. He always willingly shared his expertise.

Presque Isle and Erie, Pennsylvania

Presque Isle is an arch-shaped sand peninsula that juts into Lake Erie near Erie, Pennsylvania, and encloses Presque Isle Bay. The peninsula is a state park and is forested, indicating its geologic stability for at least a few hundred years. The US Army Corps of Engineers built detached breakwaters and added beach fill along the west side of Presque Isle. The east side is open to Lake Erie and gives access to the waterfront and commercial harbor of Erie, Pennsylvania. One of the first civilian projects of the US Army Corps of Engineers was to build jetties and protect the entrance to Erie harbor, as authorized by the Rivers & Harbors Act of 1824 (yes, over 200 years ago). 

 

Erie Harbor north pier (September 1999)

 

The historic wrought iron and steel Presque Isle North Pier light was forged in France and assembled on the site in 1858. It was moved to different locations on the jetty in 1882 and 1940.  

  

 

Houseboats on Presque Isle Bay

Presque Isle is a stopover for migrating birds. One day, I met a ranger who was releasing some ducks that had entered a trap. He said the plan to check tags on the ducks was not providing new population data. The ducks learned that there was good food in the trap that did not require much work to enjoy. They entered the trap, waited for the kindly ranger to release them, and returned the next day for another easy lunch. 

Rats, raccoons, skunks, mice, and karate

Health food (exact location not recorded)

 (Fuji Super HQ 100 film, Olympus OM2S camera)

Melody Deli, 1402 East Lake Road, Erie

 

In the 1990s, Erie was a bit rough, an old time industrial city that had fallen on hard times. I do not know if it has revived in the last quarter century. In the 1990s, there were many interesting local business and stores throughout the city.

 

Toledo, Ohio 

 

My daughter and I explored Luna Pier and some of the shore along the very west end of Lake Erie. I was on my way to Cleveland to attend a conference, so she took me to Toledo to pick up the MegaBus. We looked at a map and saw that the stop was adjacent to Southwyck Mall. OK, no problem. But when we reached our destination, we saw that the mall was being actively squashed and demolished. One of the former stores was Montgomery Ward (also known as Monkey Ward). 

The MegaBus ride to Cleveland was efficient and quiet, but the company no longer serves Toledo. Why didn't I take the Amtrak?

 

Waiting for Monkey Ward to open, Southwyck Mall, July 20, 2009 

(Olympus E-330 digital file)

 

 

Cleveland, Ohio 

   

Wow, nice hotel room in Cleveland!

Cuyahoga River, Cleveland

This amazing railroad bascule bridge is the former Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Bridge 463 at the end of Sycamore Street. The railroad built it in 1957 when the Cuyahoga river was widened. There are no tracks leading to it any more, and the bridge remains as a monument to mid-century engineering. I am always impressed at some of the engineering and construction that the railroad companies accomplished in the 20th century. 

 

On the Waterfront, Cleveland

We had a reception at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the modern building on the left in the photo above. What a treat to have a private evening there. 

This ends a too-short tour of some Great Lakes towns. I have not been back to the Lakes for at least a decade. Time to return!

I took these pictures with various cameras and film types. I scanned the slides or negatives on a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED film scanner, operated by NikonScan 4.03 software running under Windows 7. The 2009 frames are from my Olympus E-330, a very competent 4/3 format (not micro 4/3) camera with excellent lenses.

On the Waterfront: the Detroit River

The city of Detroit is situated on the west side of the Detroit River. This river has great hydrologic, commercial, and ecological importance to the Lakes and the Upper Midwest.

First, the river connects the upper Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, and Huron) with Lake Erie to the south. This means that almost all the water from the upper lakes passes through this channel on its way to the lower lakes and, eventually, to the Atlantic Ocean.  The water flows southwest from Lake Huron via the St. Clair River to Lake St. Clair and thence through the Detroit River southwest and south past the city on the way to Lake Erie. (It is confusing, but one major water passage has two names.)

Second, the Detroit River today forms part of the most extensive inland deep-draft waterway in the world. The Great Lakes Waterway is also known as the St. Lawrence Seaway.  Ocean-going ships can penetrate from saltwater deep into the continent (all the way to Duluth at the west end of Lake Superior) and carry cargo without having to offload to smaller vessels. This is an immense economic benefit to reduce the cost of rehandling. Most other extensive inland waterways, such as China's canals, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, and the Mississippi north of Baton Rouge, are shallow-draft, meaning designed for barges and inland vessels. They typically only have draft of 6-9 ft. But, the Federal Navigation Project in the Detroit River has a project depth of 27 ft, which is maintained by dredging.  Therefore, much larger cargo vessels can ply the Great Lakes and carry bulk materials such as coal, iron ore, gravel, cement, corn, wheat, and bulky manufactured goods. Panamax-class container vessels cannot enter the Lakes, but lesser-draft lake and ocean vessels have passage most of the year (depending on ice cover). There have been proposals to enlarge the locks along the St. Lawrence Seaway and deepen the channels sufficiently to allow Panamax vessels to carry cargo all the way into the Lakes, but such a project would cost billions and takes decades. It is unlikely this will ever happen.

As far as I know, there are five deep-draft inland waterways in the world:

1. The St. Lawrence Seaway as far as Duluth, Minnesota
2. Congo River as far as Matadi
3. Rio Orinoco as far as the Caroní River (approx. 225 miles)
4. Rio Amazonas as far as Manaus, Brazil
5. The Yangtze in China as far as Wuhan (approx. 600 miles)

Possibly you could include the Thames, lower Mekong, and the Port of Rotterdam to this list, but I think of these as dredged river mouths rather than an improved system with locks and/or major dredging to allow ships deep into a land mass.

Third, the Detroit River is of major biological importance because its fishery resources move freely across the boundary between two nations (Canada and USA), and represent millions or billions of dollars in revenue each year to each nation.

The Detroit riverfront was formerly an industrial area of warehouses and factories, but has been converted to recreational use in the last decade or so.  It is really pleasant on a warm sunny evening to walk along the embankment and watch ships pass and people enjoy themselves.

Interesting people hang out on a summer evening.

This view shows the International Riverfront and Rivard Plaza Merry-Go-Round. The cluster of glass towers in the distance is the Renaissance Center, also known as the General Motors Renaissance Center. The four 39-story corner buildings are office towers, while the 73-story unit in the middle is the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center. With 1298 rooms, it is a large hotel on any standard.

The complex was originally conceived by Henry Ford II and other businessmen in 1970 as a way to forge a Renaissance in downtown Detroit. We think of Detroit's calamitous decay as being a recent phenomenon, but deep trouble was obvious as early as the infamous 1968 summer riots, when many blocks of tenements burned. Businesses moved out from downtown, and serious decay set in. The hotel opened in 1977, and Ford originally occupied some of the office space. 

General Motors bought the complex to use as its world headquarters in 1996 and completed a 500-million renovation in 2004. Somewhere in the towers is the now-infamous private elevator for use by top-level executives so that they could emerge from their cars in their private parking garage and get whisked up to the executive suites without having to mix with lowly GM engineers and mid-level managers. Imagine having to mix with engineers and hear technical details about your product. Even worse, marketers might tell you that your cars were not selling.

Fireworks over the river are awesome if you have access to an upper floor in the Marriott. As I recall, I was invited to a suite rented by a dredging company. Most of the guys drank, but I took photographs.

The view inland is not as interesting as the view over the river. The terrain is flat, and you see office buildings and warehouses. This area looks reasonably prosperous and is well-policed because of the tourist trade - you have to drive inland and north to see the blocks with burned-out homes and empty lots reverting to prairie.

Just a few blocks to the west is Greektown, a block of restaurants and stores with a Greek theme. As I recall, downtown Detroit used to be a food desert, but in Greektown, you could get a good meal and finish off the evening with a pastry - or two - or three.

I took these photographs with my Fujifilm F31fd compact digital camera. 

A Pocket of Hope in Detroit, the Heidelberg Project

Detroit, Michigan, This once-great industrial city is situated on the Detroit River and was the birthplace of the American automobile industry. It was also the industrial powerhouse that turned out vast amounts of munitions, airplanes, and military vehicles that helped us win World War II. But since the 1960s, it has also become an infamous example of urban decay taken to such an extreme extent, it boggles the mind. This was not a war zone, like Stalingrad in 1942; it was self-imposed decay caused by decades of racial strife, corruption, incompetence, theft, greed, and stupidity. Are there any more terms we can apply? Several former mayors were jailed for corruption. As of 2014, the city is in bankruptcy. But there are pockets of hope. One of these is the Heidelberg Project, a neighborhood of art projects that attracts tourists and shows that something creative can be extracted from the mess. The Project even has a web page.

Walk around, and you see houses covered with teddy bears, signs, balls, puffy things, and bits of plumbing. Even the street has dots. Some of the houses are occupied; some are only used during the day for classes or projects.

If you want, you can also have little lions, ducks, dragons, and monkeys.

Stop to look at the details. There are plenty of non-subtle comments on the American consumer society, the gun mystique, poisonous foods, and legal drugs.

The famous buried Hummer. These people really, really did not like Hummers. Or maybe they liked them because they were such an extreme example of modern American consumer society and its cult of self-gratification via gross material possessions.

The pink bicycle is just in front of the pink Hummer.

Unfortunately, all you need to do is walk a block or two to either side of Heidelberg, and you see stark evidence of what has befallen much of Detroit: abandoned houses, fields, tatty signs, and closed stores.

Not all is well even here. Arson is cheap entertainment in Detroit, and even the Heidelberg Project was not immune. From their web page:

Just before 3:00AM on March 7th, the colorful Party Animal House (a favorite of children) located on Mt. Elliot (between Heidelberg and Elba Streets) was destroyed by arson, the 9th fire over an 11-month period. Though DFD responded within five minutes of the first call, their focus quickly shifted from the already destroyed Art Installation, to protecting the adjacent home of longtime residents. Though the neighboring structure suffered significant water and fire damage, its residents were unharmed and remain in surprisingly good spirits. This is the ninth fire set at the internationally renowned art environment since May, 2013, when The Obstruction of Justice house was first set ablaze.

Another essay on the arson at the Heidelberg is from David Uberti.

We will look at more Detroit photographs in future articles. Click for photographs of the International Waterfront. Heidelberg photographs were taken in 2010 with an Olympus E-330 digital camera and the Olympus 14-54mm lens. I reprocessed the RAW files with PhotoNinja software.

Update June 6, 2017: Some powerful black and white film photographs from south Detroit:
https://www.35mmc.com/04/06/2017/35mm-large-format-detroit/

Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad Station, Saginaw, Michigan

Saginaw, Michigan, was once a prosperous timber and, later, manufacturing city in northeast Michigan. It was founded in 1816 as a trading post on the Saginaw River and grew rapidly throughout the 1800s. The first railroad to enter East Saginaw was the Flint and Pere Marquette, to be followed by other lines as the city's trade and industrial capacity increased. During the height of their power and industry, the F&PM Railroad built a magnificent brick station on Potter Street. I am not sure of the exact date or architect, but the size of the structure attest to the amount of passenger traffic in the 1880s. The detailing and quality construction also attest to a pride of construction and desire to make a lasting monument that we seldom see today. The Potter Street station was abandoned decades ago, and AMTRAK uses a different station in another part of town. Northeast Saginaw is blighted and no development plans have borne results. Sometime in the mid- to late-1990s, the station was gutted by fire. Several groups have attempted restoration, but the great building remains a gutted shell. Some of the towers and walls have been braced to prevent collapse. I fear this fine example of American industrial architecture will continue to deteriorate.

Our race to t6he bottom continues.